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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5089011" data-attributes="member: 26473">I think all referees need to nudge a bit from time-to-time, but I prefer to do my nudging out-of-game.It's been my experience that trying to resolve out-of-game issues in-game creates more problems than it solves. If the players as a group are having a hard time focusing, then I'd rather put aside the game for the night and do something else instead, like pull out a board game, or a deck of cards, or whatever.It sounds like you are willing to go to great lengths on behalf of your players to insure that they have a good game-night experience, but I have to ask, do you ever feel like you go too far in indulging your players? Is it reasonable to ask them to maybe make the effort to rise to the occasion, instead of repeatedly shifting gears from game-night to game-night?I'll be honest, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "introducing them to the setting by giving them things to react to," so I'm not quite sure what to make of this.On a more general note, doesn't every referee introduce the setting in play to some degree? I mean, I've introduced new gamers to the Third Imperium for Traveller, a sprawling sandbox setting, and I spent no more than seven or eight minutes before character creation describing the foundational conceits and another few minutes describing the sector where play would begin - the rest was introduced as needed. For Le Ballet de l'Acier, a historical setting, the players don't need to read Mousnier's two-volume history of the institutions of Ancien Regime France to get started - they just need to know at the outset, "Paris, 1625, The Three Musketeers - go!" and the detail gets added as the game progresses.Makes perfect sense, but if you think that's something different from the way a sandbox referee prepares, then I believe that's a misapprehension.No matter how much time I have to prep, there is no way I can detail every chateau and village in France, or every hectare of every planet in the Third Imperium, or what-have-you. Large sections of my settings perforce must remain broadly defined, but what I do know is enough to improvise in such a way as to maintain the integrity and verisimilitude of the setting as we play. For example, sometimes all I've got is a sentence or even just a few words, like my notes for the province of Auvergne in France ("Medieval Appalachia," reflecting the fact that Auvergnats tend to be isolated and rustic), but it's enough on which to build as the need arises.For me that's part of the pitch before the game even starts: if we're playing 'space truckers' of the Third Imperium, or swashbucklers in the France of Dumas and Sabatini and Weyman, the kinds of conflicts likely to arise in the course of the game should be generally understood from the outset, so there is at least some measure of tacit acceptance of what may come down the track after the game begins.</blockquote>

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